I was reminded of Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy's infamous sound byte (used as the title of this article) when I read about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's foot-in-mouth moment during a recent CNBC interview (YouTube Link). Here's what Schmidt said: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

His comment sounded to me like, "we will retain things for as long as we feel like, because that's important to us; your privacy is not." This hurts the move towards online services. Many service providers should understand that retention timelines are part of the value proposition for the service. There is no reason to retain personally identifiable search queries for any length of time at all. Aggregate useful statistics, and delete it.

Is this where Google (finally) loses its Teflon coating as a for-profit pro-consumer company?